This chapter introduces the key metaphysical concepts that are integral to understanding the nature of time. It also critically assesses the leading arguments in this intellectual landscape, arguing that there are compelling metaphysical reasons to endorse a B-theory or C-theory and reject all A-theories (particularly presentism, the growing block, and the moving spotlight).

Chapter 3 considers a set of arguments, presented by Richard Swinburne and William Lane Craig, claiming that General Relativity can save the A-theory by substantiating objective passage via cosmic time. This argument is assessed and found wanting.

This chapter offers an in-depth reflection on the significance of time and temporality to the practice of toleration. Time-shaped Christian imagining of the other as “becoming” and growing into its own image. Constitutions, too, exist within certain temporal rhythms: they bind people within a specific space and in a specific time to a set of fundamental rules and arrangements. The binding of time by constitutions is an assertion of power in the saeculum, but also an expression of a need to better live with diversity. It is vital to the “emancipation” of modern constitutionalism from toleration that the constitution does not require a dominant or exclusive set of temporalities to establish order. Rather, constitutions need to allow for citizens to keep time differently, for example through the protection of rights and freedoms.

In this chapter, Qureshi-Hurst turns towards empirical science, introducing Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity and arguing that its most compelling interpretation is committed to the existence of the block universe. The neo-Lorentzian interpretation is analysed and rejected.

The aims and scope of ’Salvation in the Block Universe’ are set out.

The main arguments are summarised, and Qureshi-Hurst looks ahead to promising areas of future scholarship.

This chapter considers gender dynamics within the new Pentecostal churches and the role of young women within them. It explores Pentecostal gender constructions and how they conflict with the RPF’s more ‘progressive’ gender policies. The chapter foregrounds young women’s timework and how their actions are oriented towards leaving a Christian legacy for imagined heirs in the future. Here legacy is related to notions of urwibutso (memorial), with the concept taking on new meanings in Pentecostal churches. This chapter continues the discussion of Christian ubwenge, arguing that it becomes particularly important for young Pentecostal women.

This chapter elaborates a contextualized account of Horace’s interests in nature and the nonhuman. It traces the connections in his lyric poetry between the nonhuman environment and various concepts of nature. Drawing on long-standing poetic traditions, as well as developments in Hellenistic philosophy, Horace forges a poetry in which distilled perceptions of the nonhuman world undergird insights into ethical concepts of nature by which humans should live their lives. The chapter finds in this poetics a complex form of nature poetry that usefully complicates that concept within the history of the lyric. In order to write this poetry, Horace authenticates his vatic status through claims about his own special relationship with the nonhuman environment and the gods. Horace’s special connection to the divine allows him to enjoy a privileged relationship with his nonhuman surroundings. And it is because of this status that he can command us with urgency and authority to attend to our environments. Horace represents himself as a supernatural poet of nature, whose literary achievement transcends nature even as it teaches about nature’s limits.

With animal embodiment, the project of Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature comes full circle: The opening selection of text on space and time end with twin terms – place and movement – and in animal embodiment we finally get the natural phenomenon that does justice to both. The animal body is the first physical body to have three properly distinguished dimensions, and it is only in virtue of those qualitative, organic dimensions that we can abstract away a three-dimensional Euclidean space in which such bodies are taken to appear and to move. Hegel divides his discussion of the animal into discussions of its formation, assimilation, and species-process, and the chapter adopts that categorization as its structure. As a first pass, it says that form (die Gestalt) gives us the special point 0 for time and the step from the plane to an enclosing surface for space; assimilation gives us the order of time and the step from line to plane for space; and the species process (Gattungsprozeß) gives us the linearity of time and the step from point to line for space. These combinations display the animal body as the spatio-temporal object par excellence, and thus the object by reference to which all spatiality and temporality is understood.

This chapter discusses the sections of finite and absolute mechanics of Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature which are predicated upon his theory of space and time. It starts with the emergent notions of matter and movement before giving the details of the mechanical analysis in a close reading. Giving a foundation for Kepler’s laws is not only a touchstone of Hegel’s theory but is an integral rung in a system of steps building natural science from space and time. The chapter exposes three main strands of argument: dimensional realization of time and space in movement of matter, striving towards inner and outer centers of extended bodies, and the realization of a system of bodies in motion which materializes a complexity paralleling not only of the tripartite system general-particular-individual of his logic but additionally includes two particulars – as necessary in Hegel’s account of nature. Lastly, the chapter comments briefly on the relationship to Kant, Newton, and classical mechanics, as well as on modern aspects. As it demonstrates, Hegel’s treatment of mechanics is not an idiosyncratic way of presenting celestial mechanics but contains radical, quite modern metaphysical concepts which are not only interesting in their own right but furnish a key to the understanding of his system.